Alliance Management and Maintenance

129 Pages·2007·0.75 MB·English

by  John R. Deni

ALLIANCE MANAGEMENT AND MAINTENANCE
To Shuchi and Mira
Alliance Management
and Maintenance
Restructuring NATO for the 21st Century
JOHN R. DENI
Political Advisor to US Military Forces in Europe and
Adjunct Lecturer at Heidelberg University
© John R. Deni 2007
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
John R. Deni has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as the author of this work. The views expressed are those of the author and
do not reflect the official policy or position of the US Department of Defense or the US
Government.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
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Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Deni, John R.
Alliance management and maintenance : restructuring NATO
for the 21st century
1. North Atlantic Treaty Organization - Armed Forces -
Organization 2. North Atlantic Treaty Organization -
Administration 3. Peacekeeping forces 4. Security,
International 5. Military doctrine
I. Title
355'.031'091821
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Deni, John R.
Alliance management and maintenance : restructuring NATO for the 21st century / by
John R. Deni.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-7039-1
1. North Atlantic Treaty Organization--Organization. 2. North Atlantic Treaty
Organization--Military policy. 3. Security, International. 4. World
politics--1989- I. Title. II. Title: Restructuring NATO for the 21st century.
UA646.3.D45 2007
355'.031091821--dc22
2007000326
ISBN: 978-0-7546-7039-1
Cover Design: Pica Design, LLC | picadesign.com
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Managing Alliances 9
Work on Alliance Management to Date 10
Addressing Change in Alliances 12
The Role of Organizational Studies in Analyzing NATO 15
Resisting Change 16
Adapting and Learning 17
Rationing Activity 18
3 Assessing Military Doctrine and Structures 19
Doctrine and its Role 19
The Sources of Doctrine 21
Intra-Alliance Bargaining 23
Understanding the Process and Content of Doctrinal Change 26
Expected Outcomes 27
4 The Development of the NRDCs 29
The Alliance Structure 29
Immediate Post-Cold War Changes 33
Evidence of Doctrinal Change? 34
Toward Real Changes in Doctrine and Force Structure 38
MC 400 – Setting the Stage 40
The Command Structure 42
The Force Structure 45
5 Changing Threats and the Alliance’s Response 55
Can Security Threats Explain NATO’s Doctrine and Structures? 55
The Suboptimal Alliance Response 58
Missed Opportunities – Defense Capabilities 58
Missed Opportunities – Stability and Security in Albania 62
Missed Opportunities – Bosnia 64
6 The Impact of Political Bargaining 67
Bargaining Over Expeditionary Capabilities 67
vi Alliance Management and Maintenance
Bargaining Among the HRF(L) Candidates 71
The German-Netherlands Corps 71
The Spanish Corps 73
The Eurocorps 74
The Turkish Corps 75
The ARRC 76
The Italian Corps 77
Summary 78
Bargaining Over Command Relationships 79
Summary 84
7 The Alliance’s Response to Terrorism 85
The Political Guidance 86
MC 472 and MC 161 89
Implementation of the Military Concept against Terrorism 90
Anti-Terrorism 90
Consequence Management 92
Counterterrorism 94
Military Cooperation 99
8 Conclusions and Implications 101
Addressing Doctrine and Structure 102
Implications of this Study 106
Bibliography 109
Index 119
Chapter 1
Introduction
In 2002, NATO began implementing significant changes in its command and force
structures.1 Gone would be the heavy, armor-based forces of the Cold War era, judged
by some as too slow and too large for the challenges of the post-Cold War security
environment. The new security landscape would be marked by nationalist, ethnic,
and religious conflicts and unconventional, transnational threats such as terrorism.
Although the alliance commitment to collective defense as embodied in Article 5 of
the North Atlantic treaty would remain, the threat of a Soviet or Russian armored
column spearheading an attack through the Fulda Gap in West Germany simply did
not exist any longer. Even though the alliance’s force structure was beginning to
undergo significant changes in 2002, the bi-polar world of the Cold War had actually
come to an abrupt end over a decade earlier, following popular revolutions all over
Central Europe in 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of that year, and
German reunification less than a year later. In April 1991, the Warsaw Pact disbanded,
and the Soviet Union followed suit eight months later on 26 December 1991.
Given this seismic shift in the security environment in the late 1980s and the early
1990s, the alliance came to recognize that both the way that NATO would provide
security for its members and the means that it would employ in that effort needed to
change – more expeditionary forces and supporting elements were needed for rapid
deployment to zones of conflict beyond alliance member state territory. In the place
of Cold War era heavy forces geared primarily to territorial defense, NATO heads of
state and government began to create a command and force structure comprised of
lighter, faster, and more readily deployable headquarters and forces to be known as
the NATO Rapid Deployment Corps (NRDCs). NATO’s actions in 2002 and 2003
surrounding the implementation of the NRDC force structure marked the beginning
of a process of significant post-Cold War structural changes for the alliance.
However, the process that brought the alliance to that point was significantly slower
than what one might have expected of the most successful alliance in history and the
outcome of that process failed to correspond to what NATO itself had identified as
its requirements. These issues surrounding the development of the NRDCs and the
doctrinal concepts underpinning them collectively represent a useful window for
examining alliance management during a period of transition.
Upon initial investigation, the changes implemented by the alliance beginning
in 2002 appear to have been based on changes in the security environment. Those
1 “Command structure” and “force structure” are two distinct military concepts. The
former refers to the organizational bodies that command and control military forces. The latter
refers to the specific military forces or units that fall under the command structure. However,
in practice within NATO the distinction between the two is sometimes blurred.
2 Alliance Management and Maintenance
changes were reflected in alliance doctrine, which is based on a strategy – or
Strategic Concept – that was rewritten in 1991 to incorporate the realities of the end
of the Cold War and then most recently updated again in 1999.2 Both the 1991 and
the 1999 Strategic Concepts identified new, post-Cold War threats – such as ethnic
and religious strife, terrorism, and proliferation – and prescribed in general terms
the kinds of capabilities necessary to counter the new threats. Alliance doctrine
draws on these important documents, as well as guidance from the member state
governments. Like the Strategic Concepts, such guidance has, since the early 1990s,
also emphasized the changed threat environment, directing alliance officials to craft
new doctrine and structures in response.
However, a threat-based interpretation of the way in which the alliance managed
itself through a period of great transition is somewhat flawed for at least two reasons.
First, if NATO’s doctrine and structures were driven by changes in the post-Cold
War world, it seems counterintuitive that the alliance would spend scarce defense
resources on more high readiness units than it needed instead of plowing that money
into sustainment and deployment capabilities necessary to meet the new threats. To
explain, NATO determined that it required three of the NRDCs to be at the highest
levels of readiness – the so-called High Readiness Forces (HRFs) – and yet in the
end the alliance selected six High Readiness Forces. Assuming a certain degree of
fungibility in defense spending and assuming little growth in member state defense
budgets, developing and maintaining six of these expensive HRFs meant that other,
equally important defense capabilities such as sustainment and deployment went
under-funded. This naturally raises the question of why the alliance and its member
states essentially chose to shortchange these other capability areas and establish
more high readiness NRDCs than were required.
Perhaps the Strategic Concept and ministerial guidance did not account for all
of the likely threats, leaving alliance members concerned that three high readiness
forces would not be enough. However, a threat-based interpretation of doctrinal
development could reasonably be expected to predict high levels of integration
among the strategy that identifies the threats in the security environment, the doctrine
that outlines how the alliance will handle the threats, and the command and force
structures that confront and mitigate the threats, so this possible explanation seems
unlikely.3
Alternatively, in deciding to approve the development of six high readiness units,
perhaps the alliance was actually responding to imperatives other than threats. If
so, it begs the questions of what those imperatives were and why the alliance was
motivated to act upon them, ultimately at the expense of other priorities.
2 In recent years, that has been talk of a revisiting the alliance’s strategy. During the
November 2006 summit in Riga, alliance leaders issued the Comprehensive Political Guidance
(CPG), which is designed not to replace or update the Strategic Concept but rather to provide
further guidance on its implementation.
3 Barry Posen argues that threat-based approaches predict high degrees of integration
between force structure, doctrine, and strategy. The Sources of Military Doctrine: France,
Britain, and Germany Between the World Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984),
p. 80.
Introduction 3
Second, if NATO was driven to revise its doctrine and structures because of
the end of the Cold War and the development of new threats, it is unclear why the
alliance took so long – from 1991 to 2002 – to conduct planning and then to finally
begin implementation of such changes. New post-Cold War threats were evident
a decade before in places like Bosnia, were acknowledged by NATO’s member
states, and were reflected in the alliance’s 1991 Strategic Concept. Yet despite
this, it was not until 2002 that NATO began to implement the structural changes.
An objective observer might expect an alliance dedicated to mitigating threats to
member state security to have acted or responded sooner, before those threats led
to conflict as was the case in the Balkans on three separate occasions in the 1990s.
Indeed, one might argue that member states and citizens of those member states
should reasonably expect a slightly better response time from an organization
billed as the most successful alliance in history.
This book will attempt to answer these and other questions surrounding
the NRDCs, the sources of NATO’s military doctrine, the level of integration
between NATO’s doctrine and structures on the one hand and its strategy on the
other, and the management of an alliance in transition. In doing so, this book will
show that a threat-based perspective is necessary but insufficient for explaining
NATO’s management of the changing environment of the post-Cold War era for
a variety of reasons, including those noted above. Instead, we must employ other
tools to gain insights into how the North Atlantic alliance managed to navigate
the significant changes required of its force and command structures.
To better understand both the outcome of the process NATO engaged in to
change its doctrine and structures and the nature of that process, we must turn
to what scholars have written in two distinct, but in this situation related, areas
of political science – 1) alliance maintenance or management and 2) the sources
of military doctrine. Relative to other areas of study in international relations,
alliance maintenance has seen surprisingly little attention from scholars. Certainly
several scholars have attempted to expand our understanding of alliances over the
last several decades, such as in Stephen Walt’s important work, The Origins of
Alliances. Nevertheless, the few studies of alliance maintenance or management
that have been done have tended to focus on a very limited array of subjects
not entirely applicable to understanding how an alliance with an integrated,
institutionalized military manages or maintains itself over time, particularly in
the face of significant change. For instance, many of these works have essentially
consisted of quantitative analyses of whether alliance formation leads to war or
of alliance duration and subsequent failure. Most other works on the subject of
alliance management have been derivatives of the larger academic debate over
collective goods theory and therefore focused almost exclusively on burden-
sharing.
An important exception to these trends was Glenn Snyder’s 1997 book, Alliance
Politics, in which the author focused specifically on alliance maintenance by
examining intra-alliance bargaining. Snyder argued that bargaining power within an
alliance depends on three factors – the allies’ dependence on the alliance to protect
it from threats, the allies’ commitment to the alliance, and the allies’ comparative